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Anonymous at Mon, 10 Jun 2024 18:24:21 UTC No. 16227173
Is non-carbon based life (e.g. silicon, tin, germanium, boron, arsenic) purely sci-fi wishful thinking, or are there any conceivable circumstances under which it might appear?
Anonymous at Mon, 10 Jun 2024 18:39:41 UTC No. 16227195
>>16227173
the idea that life "appears" is wishful thinking.
in all of scientific history there has never been a single instance of life being created; it only is reproduced with the starting material of other already existing lifeforms.
Anonymous at Mon, 10 Jun 2024 19:04:42 UTC No. 16227229
>>16227173
> Silicon-based
Certainly not on Earth-like planets, and highly unlikely anywhere else. Carbon is nifty because its dioxide is a semi-water-soluble gas, which means reaction with oxygen doesn't eliminate it from liquid reaction conditions entirely. Silicon dioxide (aka silica, sand, quartz etc.) is instead an insoluble solid with >1500 deg. C. melting point, so any silicon based life would have to avoid oxygen like we avoid highly radioactive materials. Which is a problem since it is far more abundant than any actinide. This crystallinity generally extends to polysilanes an well, making any more complex silicon compounds generally devoid of utility for any plausible xenobiochemistry.
Speaking of abundance, you're not going to find too much silicon compared to carbon, the most sensible comparison (both being adamantogens). Even if any silicon-based chemistry with enough variability to be interesting existed, the predominance of carbon (6.5x more abundant than Si in the milky way) means that in the time it would take for silicaceous life to emerge, carbonaceous life could develop multiple times over.
However, it's not like life has no use for silicon at all. Read up on diatoms for the most important example of biosilicon on Earth.
> Tin, Germanium, Boron, Arsenic-based
A lot of the issues with Si-based life hold here as well. Lack of abundance in particular, for example Boron has no stellar nucleosynthesis pathways and can only form through fission of heavier elements.
But, expanding on the last point about Silicon, it isn't like life can't use these elements -- life is much more about the combination of elements in variable and complex ways than about reliance upon one element in particular. Plants need Boron despite its scarcity, and some bacteria have forms of photosynthesis which depend on Arsenic as an electron donor. Tin and Germanium though seem completely alien to Earth biochemistry, but I'm sure other biochemistries using them could exist.
Anonymous at Mon, 10 Jun 2024 19:07:32 UTC No. 16227232
>>16227195
> ...it is only reproduced with the starting material of other already existing lifeforms.
Neo-vitalist trash. Look up the Miller-Urey experiment, or better yet replicate it yourself, and please at least try once to wrap your head around geological time scales.
Anonymous at Mon, 10 Jun 2024 19:22:23 UTC No. 16227254
>>16227229
based knower of things
Anonymous at Mon, 10 Jun 2024 19:33:50 UTC No. 16227266
>>16227232
>muh primordial soup
>muh millions of years
like a broken record, just regurgitate the talking points that midwits believe in to reinforce their faith in the omniscience of the priestly academic class despite it never having succeeded in synthesizing life or even protoplasm.
Anonymous at Mon, 10 Jun 2024 19:50:20 UTC No. 16227288
>>16227266
> Hard work demonstrating that certain conditions can produce simple biological compounds over time is completely invalid if it doesn't create new life
> The evidence from isotopic dating, one of the most relied upon geochronologic techniques, is similarly invalid
Please be rational, or at least attempt to give your veiled divine interventionism/panspermism some semblance of respectability by providing sensible reasons for the invalidity of the limited experimental conclusions which we can reach.
Additionally, if you have an alternative model for the formation of life which explains the current general characteristics of Earth biochemistry even marginally, please share. I only put this forth because, AFAIK, it is the most scrutinized and thoroughly tested model currently available.
Anonymous at Mon, 10 Jun 2024 21:45:24 UTC No. 16227483
>>16227288
you write like a retard